Do you need to identify and accelerate the development of your current and future global leaders?

Would your global organization benefit from a proactive approach to change management and transformation?

ITAP International understands the impact that national cultures differences have on business interactions. Our clients contact us because they need to:

Position, advertise, sell products and serve customers in other cultures

Reduce rework that is due to mis-communication and mis-interpretation of behavioral drivers to improve performance on mission critical teams

Conduct research on the impact that cultural differences have on topics such as attitudes towards safety and risk, reward and recognition approaches, medical devices help desk virtual support, and the cultural barriers to effective global mergers

Identify and develop global talent, who will succeed and stay as well as global talent already within their organization

ITAP engages as partners in actions that enhance your ability to work towards and achieve the organizational mission. ITAP helps build knowledge, capability and effectiveness through:

Management of change focusing on organizational systems and structures as well as the needs of employees

Assessment and adaption of cultural localization to assure sound leadership, management and/or operations throughout an organization

Enhancement of coordination across functions, divisions, countries or other borders

Identification, selection, development and retention of leaders and critical talent, and assuring they are ready for succession.

Global Human Resources Management and Organizational Development

Often one of a company's most expensive assets is its human capital, the human resources of the organization. The management of your human resources focuses on:

Recruitment and selection of employees who can succeed at their jobs and who will stay with your organization, and

Making sure that employees' abilities are optimally nurtured and developed so that the company can receive an optimal return on the investment made in these employees.

Recruitment and Selection

This is particularly difficult in a global organization where one of your biggest challenges will be finding, retaining and developing a superior global workforce. ITAP knows how to identify the "success factors" of a position…which is a key to identification of superior candidates. Successful companies know what the jobs entail and seek to hire those candidates who can be more successful/effective with the lowest amount of support. Well written job descriptions or learning maps that clearly delineate needed capabilities make for effective selection and hiring. Understanding cultural differences in the recruitment process, the selection of candidates and what motivates employees in various cultures is crucial to the success of global organizations.

Targeted Interview Techniques

In addition ITAP can support your selection process using and teaching you to use Behavior Event Interviewing (BRI) or Targeted Interview (TI) techniques. While not difficult to learn, they are far more effective at identifying exactly what capabilities particular candidates could bring to your organization. This is particularly important when recruiting and selecting across cultures.

Assimilating New Employees

In this competitive environment for attracting global talent, companies need to pay particular attention to the perception of the company/brand on the part of candidates and new hires. A well thought out and extensive assimilation process often makes new employees more likely to stay. This process should start before the offer is made, and many companies have assimilation plans for at least the initial six months on the job. This is especially important in group and relationship cultures as it helps the new employees feel welcomed into the group and gives them time and structure to establish relationships that will be important to the employee as well as anchor their loyalty to the company. ITAP can support your development of an effective onboarding or assimilation process.

Helping your employees recognize that they work in a multi-cultural environment or a global environment is an official reminder that there is an expectation that they will attend to cultural differences. ITAP's extensive experience in workforce development can focus on this need. General awareness programs are a good start. In addition, ITAP can provide specific programs targeted to functional needs (global marketing, or global e-learning development), and/or on culture-specific needs, such as Understanding Your Chinese Employees or Presenting to Japanese Audiences.

Localizing Your Employee Handbook and Job Descriptions

The meaning of job titles and job responsibilities vary across cultures. ITAP can help you localize these - make them appropriate for various geographies in which these positions are located. ITAP has depth and breadth of experience in developing global employees.

Performance Management

In many cultures there is a preference for well documented performance systems. Communicating exactly what is expected and defining the levels of behaviors and assessing employees all against the same criteria feels more fair to many employees. Performance systems that depend on manager discretion can be viewed as "favoritism" and "unfair."

Global Leadership Selection and Retention

If you know what behaviors differentiate the successful employees, recruiting (external) and selecting (internal) against these behaviors reduces the need for development (as you hire those who already have the needed skills) and benefits employees by recognizing those who already have the skills necessary to succeed.

The global leadership behaviors required for success include:

The flexibility to work and manage across cultures

The ability to be the voice of the local culture to home office while being the voice of home office to the local employees

Understanding of and ability to adapt to cultural differences as they impact business practices

If you want your global leaders to succeed and stay, ITAP can help you:

Define the behaviors associated with the actual success factors in YOUR company

Identify internal and external candidates who already have those success factors

Strategic HR

Unless your HR professionals have a thorough knowledge of global business, what it takes to establish companies in new geographies and the needs of the local workers in country, you need the help that ITAP can give. We can be your local arm by temporarily outsourcing your start-up HR in new geographies.

Since a company's strategy will impact its employees, you need HR support that understands the global landscape, everything from the recruitment and hiring techniques used in other countries, to the establishment of contracts, and compensation and benefits packages. ITAP's strategic partners can support global companies in 200 countries around the world.

Globalizing the HR Function: HR Staff Development

As companies globalize, their HR departments need to understand the challenges of working in and serving a global organization. ITAP can provide:

Consulting behind the scenes for HR professionals to support them as they serve the needs of their global organizations

Web content HR professionals can use to sell to, train or explain about and be a better global business partner

Certification for HR professionals in the administration and use of ITAP tools and services

Act as temporary staff to supplement the capabilities of the existing professionals.

The development of your organization and, particularly, how you manage change impacts the success of your business. Managing change and growth across cultures and geographies requires specific knowledge of the impact of change and growth needs in particular cultures.

ITAP understands the cultural nuances of change in many cultures and can support your organization in collecting and analyzing data on work culture and employee climate surveys to assure responses are culturally appropriate. Our understanding of cross-border change initiatives can greatly reduce the usual issues created by change initiatives and address culturally specific issues.

Companies that institute either small or large scale change need to attend to the needs of the employees before, during and after this process. ITAP can support the Change process throughout its life cycle. We can:

Provide change team leader support and data/information from assessment results

Provide the organization with data on the impact of the change.

e-StrategyMapper™

e-StrategyMapper™ creates a strategy map for business and helps organizations manage the strategy implementation through a Balanced Score Card and strategic action plans. Organizations can benefit from the eStrategyMapper output to prioritize investments and their change initiatives, as well as putting figures to targets and preparing appropriate action plans.

Action Learning

Imagine selecting "talent to watch" and assigning them an as yet unsolved business problem. Give them some parameters about expected outcomes, timeframes, and how to collect information - and watch them learn. One learning coach and monthly measuring their learnings (using the Action Learning Team Process Questionnaire™) insures they:

Learn about cross-functional issues

Meet people from all over the company

Get into the day to day issues these people face.

Well defined action learning projects can resolve seemingly insurmountable business issues, develop and challenge talent, and cost nowhere near what a month at business school would cost.

Cross Cultural Competency

Developing competency and leadership models that are effective internationally: ITAP's special focus on "Cross Cultural Competency" and the concept of "Behavioral Diversity"

Defined as "the personal capabilities, underlying characteristics and behaviors that drive superior performance at work across national boundaries" - there is no doubt that for today's global organization, "cross-cultural competence" is critical. It is a simple and obvious truth that success in cross-cultural roles requires cross-cultural competency. International roles are complex, challenging and demand a wider range of capabilities than domestic roles. Most critically, they demand flexibility in the means by which objectives are achieved - even if those objectives may be "universal."

Yet most organizations design and implement - even impose - leadership models and employee expectations that are in effect mono-cultural in content, so that "diversity" is by default limited to those who at least behave like the organization's home culture.- But what is 'best practice" in one culture might be wholly ineffective (or even offensive) in another. There is no universal "global approach" that can be defined by the same behaviors that works for every culture. While the competency may be global - such as Leadership - the behavioral expectations will differ from culture to culture if that Leader is to be effective in delivering what the organization needs internationally.

This illustrates what we mean by "Behavioral Diversity" - enabling an organization to recognize the value and validity of a range of behavioral alternatives that will produce what the organization needs - but not always in just the way practices are applied at head-office.

ITAP offers a thorough and effective methodology for:

Auditing and assessing existing leadership models against the organization's international needs

Creating internationally viable and inclusive leadership models

Enabling an organization to focus on maximizing output, rather than limiting output to those who 'behave like us.'